Tuesday, 12 August 2008

Is Boris Johnson planning further cuts to Police?

Boris Johnson is considering merging the Metropolitan Police Authority Headquarters with the Greater London Authority, it was revealed today.

Sources at City Hall say speculation is rife that Boris will move the authority lock and stock into City Hall leading to huge job cuts within one or both organisations.

One source told the Troll that:

"The rumour that the MPA is to be relocated is still circulating. Although how they intend to find desk space for another 100 people in City Hall is beyond me - unless this means 100 redundancies of City hall based staff."

During the election campaign, Boris Johnson repeatedly denied that there would be any cuts to police spending and even famously called Gordon Brown to a Point of Order on the subject .

But with the Police budget making up the vast majority of GLA spending, and with the publicity budget spent a dozen times over, we may only now be seeing where the 'big ticket savings' are actually going to come from.

11 comments:

To be perfectly fair, this is not the same as sacking officers from frontline duties. Two results are possible, assuming that their current jobs are surplus to requirement*: either the office-less officers will be freed from their desk jobs to go back to policing, or they will be laid off and money saved.

*Of course, some a combination of MPA and GLA workers could be laid off/relocated according to necessity.

This might be a little annoying for those who think "job losses=bad", and to the annonymous commenter who remarks that all Boris Johnson has done is sack people. Why the surprise? He is a conservative - he believes in small government, albeit often centralised. Bringing law and order (MPA) closer to his chest is a typically conservative policy, and shrinking the size of either the MPA or the GLA or both is also perfectly concurrant with his ideology.

I am not a conservative, but I cannot oppose this policy for the simple reason that it is conservative. If there is any good reason not to shrink either operation, then I would oppose the policy. So far, I have yet to hear what the great problem is.

Under the Thames Estuary. Originally it's going to be *in* the Thames Estuary, but of course when sea levels rise thanks to all those lovely CO2 emissions, we'll have to build a fleet of flying boats to use the thing...

A little OT, but then is Policy Exchange ever OT when discussing Boris? Today's Policy Exchange document 'Cities Unlimited' (aka 'Close down the North') is a fascinatingly bad and incoherent document that might repay closer examination (http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/libimages/413.pdf). It seems to be proposing extreme laisez-faire economics for the north, whilst the south east and particularly London are to be subjected to massive command-and-control style house building, far in excess of what the supposedly green-belt destroying, high-density skyscraper loving Labour government and former Mayor ever suggested. It even comes out in favour of targets for socially-affordable housing in London... Given his closeness to Policy Exchange, I would be fascinated to hear Boris' response to two of the report's explicit proposals: 1) forcing Bromley to built social housing for people from Blackpool; 2) closing the Royal Mail sorting offices in London (to release land) and sending all of London's post to Leicester for sorting before bringing it all back again. These are the minds that are running our city. Don't despair...yet.